'The Origin of the British' by Stephen Oppenheimer

[Deleted]

I read this book and found it really interesting and a lot more complicated picture than what was reported in the news: 'Welsh people are Basque not Celtic' etc. The genetic information in it was intriguing, even the comparisons with archeology, I think it might get a bit iffy when he gets into the linguistic element, neither him or I are experts in that area so I'll leave that to someone else. Most of the critiques I've read of the book are aimed, usually by linguists at his radical theories in this department and don't tackle the genetics themselves, or do so poorly, for obvious reasons. I wonder what you guys think of this source of information about the past? I notice that it's not something that seems to infiltrate the thinking of many people in the pagan/polytheist world. I wonder if that is because some of us are 'anti-science', or prefer someone elses analysis of the data, or think population genetics are bunk or simply believe that actual physical descent is not as important as cultural descent. Has anyone else read this or engaged with the population genetics of Britain question through other research?

[Tegernacus]

one day, when everyone on this island has been DNA mapped, we will be able to make proper conclusions. Studies like Oppenheimers, while groundbreaking, have been simultaneously disproved and proved as different studies are undertaken. For example, a 2002 study by Mike Weale discovered a "transect line", showing that by the 6th century central England (Mercia) had almost completely pushed out the previous DNA people.

mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/7/1008

There have been other studies to show the DNA of England was very similar to the DNA of Denmark. But the DNA in Wales and Ireland isn't. DNA is a new science, ask again in six months and there will be another study with another set of conclusions.

However, studies like Oppenheimer are ultimately irrelevant. Brythonic is a cultural thing, a tribal concept. Some time in the 5-9th centuries, most of England decided (or were forced) to stop being Brythonic. Which means that you can do the opposite too, you can decide to be Brythonic again

(we've done this in various threads already)

[megli]

Yes, genetics say bugger all about national/tribal identity, which can be---to a greater or lesser degree--a cultural matter. Even pretty genetically 'closed' groups like ashkenazi jews can actually be joined by a gentile prepared to convert, which then changes the population's genetics. Genetics per se impliy little about culture and nothing much about language.

[Heron]

Nov 10, 2009 8:34:53 GMT -1 Tegernacus said:

Brythonic is a cultural thing, a tribal concept.

Yes, otherwise we'd all have to go off and join a Celtic version of the BNP

[Francis]

These studies are very difficult to interpret. They all make the assumption that the DNA sequences they're looking at are selectively neutral. Is that a reasonable assumption though?

Most differences in Human DNA in Britain today are fairly selectively neutral - wherever your heritage stems from. This would have been less true in the Iron Age and earlier.

A group of Masai tribesman removed to the Lleyn several thousand years ago, with the resources and diet available to them then and there, would have really suffered with vitamin D deficiencies.

Likewise a red haired, blue-eyed group of folk transported to Kenya several thousand years ago would have been melanomered (from the verb to melanoma - leave it Megli!) out of existence very rapidly.

These are two extremes where the selective disadvantages of human genetics, shaped by the environment of one place, are rapidly selected against when transported to another environment. Perhaps only a few generations would be needed in the above extreme examples.

But more often it would have been more subtle than the above - the disadvantages not so great and many more generations would be involved.

Today it's barely apparent - culture masks so much now - modern medicine, hugely wide diet (even my local tescos will very cheaply supply with food in season from almost anywhere in the world) etc. etc.

But these studies always seem to forget (or not acknowledge for fear of what such statements about genetics might appear to validate) that once upon a time, not so long ago, our genetics were much more subtley linked to the place and culture (yes and culture) we originated in. Our genetic heritage was once much more intimately and physically involved with our survival and relationship with the land we lived on.

[Heron]

Nov 10, 2009 19:12:23 GMT -1 Francis said:

These studies are very difficult to interpret. They all make the assumption that the DNA sequences they're looking at are selectively neutral. Is that a reasonable assumption though?

Most differences in Human DNA in Britain today are fairly selectively neutral - wherever your heritage stems from. This would have been less true in the Iron Age and earlier.

A group of Masai tribesman removed to the Lleyn several thousand years ago, with the resources and diet available to them then and there, would have really suffered with vitamin D deficiencies.

Likewise a red haired, blue-eyed group of folk transported to Kenya several thousand years ago would have been melanomered (from the verb to melanoma - leave it Megli!) out of existence very rapidly.

These are two extremes where the selective disadvantages of human genetics, shaped by the environment of one place, are rapidly selected against when transported to another environment. Perhaps only a few generations would be needed in the above extreme examples.

But more often it would have been more subtle than the above - the disadvantages not so great and many more generations would be involved.

Today it's barely apparent - culture masks so much now - modern medicine, hugely wide diet (even my local tescos will very cheaply supply with food in season from almost anywhere in the world) etc. etc.

But these studies always seem to forget (or not acknowledge for fear of what such statements about genetics might appear to validate) that once upon a time, not so long ago, our genetics were much more subtley linked to the place and culture (yes and culture) we originated in. Our genetic heritage was once much more intimately and physically involved with our survival and relationship with the land we lived on.

Though Oppenheimer mainly discusses effects of European mixing in Britain: the disputed effect that Germanic invasions had on indigenous Celts, many of whom he claims were Basque in origin. Presumably climate would not have been such an issue in this context.

[redraven]

Nov 10, 2009 19:12:23 GMT -1 Francis said:

Likewise a red haired, blue-eyed group of folk transported to Kenya several thousand years ago would have been melanomered (from the verb to melanoma - leave it Megli!) out of existence very rapidly.

Thanks Francis! Do you know of a good method for removing tomato ketchup from a light coloured shirt after being expelled from the nasal cavaties in an attempt to stifle laughter?

RR

[Deleted]

Interesting. Thanks. Sorry if I'm asking questions about things that have already been covered, I'd like to be directed toward the threads being new still. I agree with much of what's been said here. Clearly genetics says little about culture, but as someone who's an ancestor worshipper I can't help being intrigued by this emergent science. I'd agree that the study is irrelevant to what it means to be 'Brythonic'. I'm not really stressed whether we were invaded and settled by central European 'Celts' or whether our ancestors were there for much longer and adopted Celtic cultural trappings. This does not really influence the way that culture would reemerge among us. I do think it has relevance to some aspects of research though. Indo-European cultural and language research will always be relevant regardless of whether we turn out not to be part of a large 'grain and steel' migration and are indeed primarily the descendents of cro-magnon man. However, if we are willing to accept that, being part of the Indo-European language family, it's relevant to examine Vedic sources, despite the large gap in time and space separating our culture from that of India; IF it does turn out to be true that we were mainly populated from the Basque parts of the world surely comparitive mythology/folklore would be of interest? I mean it's not impossible for one culture to move in and assimilate another one culturally, but usually some traces of the original culture remain. Maybe I'm just seduced by the long history Oppenheimer's thesis gives most of us in Britain! I admit I like the idea. I've always felt that my Mum's people from Wessex have been there 'forever', way back past the middle ages where we can trace them and never felt that we just came in with the Saxons. Either way, as Tegernacus says when everyone on the island has been mapped we might be closer to being able to draw conclusions, I'll be interested to see where we are with it ten or twenty years from now.

[Tegernacus]

Thing is, it's way different to say, Australia, where you can trace (and visibly so) the impact of white settlers vs the Aborignie, for example. Britain is far more complicated than that, people have been coming and going since the ice age. Even if you're looking for Angle/Saxon/Jute import it's complicated. They came from approx Denmark/Belgium - well, so did the tribes a thousand years before - only difference is the culture that was imported (so you COULD have had mass Saxon immigration and cleansing in the 5th century, but since they were the same DNA as the people already there it wouldn't show up on a DNA study).

As for your ancestors - well, no reason they couldn't have been in Wessex since the bronze age. The story of the West Country/Cornwall/Mercia/the Old North was one of conquering, conversion, rather than population replacement (which may have happened in the South-East to a greater extent, but even then you have places like Walsham in Norfolk which would tend to indicate a "Welsh" village living side-by-side with the Saxons).

The Saxon invasion happened - both Welsh and English history is full of both sides fighting. But it wasn't a genetic invasion - it was a cultural one. (Different to the later Norman invasion - that too was a cultural invasion, but made practically no cultural impact aside form a few new laws, a few castles and a few French words. The Saxon cultural invasion was complete - replacing language, stories, dress, weapons, food.. the lot)

I've had a DNA test. I match people in Wales, Ireland and Portugal. Draw your own conclusions

[Tegernacus]

but then again, in the only study large enough to be any way accurate, it is found that Modal 1, R-17-14-10 DNA (which is basically native to Britain/Ireland) exists to the north of Stoke, and West of Offas dyke, but almost nowhere in quantity (aside from a pocket in Hertfordshire) in England. Which would indicate either population removal (either by war or emigration) at some point. Whether it was in the 5th century or during the Iron-Age though, who knows?

(this map will give you an indication. North of the blue line still has mass "native" DNA, as does Wales and I would imagine an arc round the West-country into Cornwall.)

tinyurl.com/c5ekha

erm... so while fascinating, it's a bit too much like rocket-science for us mere mortals to really get our heads around. And does it matter? Well, the stone-age/bronze age peoples were highly ancestral, so it probably mattered a lot to them. Not sure about the iron-age so much, as we became more tribal then.

[megli]

I suspect, for what it's worth, that the people whom we now call the Basques are the last relic of a non-Indo-European speaking group which may once have been widespread in western europe. (Basque is a linguistic isolate, totally unrelated to any other language group in the world.) They might even be descendants of the very first people to colonise Europe. all this suggests is that relatives of this ancient group whose descendents are now the Basques had also spread to Britain and Ireland, and that their descendents switched to speaking Celtic with later invasion or the importation of La Tene cultural traits. Whether they were still speaking a language linked to Basque when they switched to celtic is impossible to recover.

[megli]

Frankly, hard as the celtic languages are, after Basque anything would be a relief...

[Francis]

Nov 10, 2009 19:21:36 GMT -1 Heron said:

Though Oppenheimer mainly discusses effects of European mixing in Britain: the disputed effect that Germanic invasions had on indigenous Celts, many of whom he claims were Basque in origin. Presumably climate would not have been such an issue in this context.

No - but my point is that there would have been more subtle selective effects. I was just demonstrating at the grossest most obvious level that however selectively neutral genetic heritage is for humans today in modern Britain - whether you're from Tasmania, Newfoundland, the Hindu Kush, the Kalahari or the Aleutian Islands your genetic heritage would be essentially selectively neutral living in modern Britain – several thousand years ago it is very likely that your genetic heritage was much more important in terms of selection/survival.

When we lived closer to nature there was more opportunity for selection to act. I suspect that even fairly subtle genetic differences would have had greater impact back then – i.e. intra-european differences may have been important.

When your body is closer to the limit of balance, as would typically have been the case by the end of harsh winters, with poor diet etc. then relatively slight metabolic differences and efficiencies would have mattered. Just think what percentage of a diet the various European staples would have been several thousand years ago. Slight differences in metabolism of these would have made big differences over many generations once upon a time - differences that would be wholly irrelevant today.

Would a group of swarthy Etruscans after generations of selection for fat metabolism geared to fish and olives be on average as well adapted to living in a land where cheese meat and oats is the only option. In the good years probably no problem, but in times of stress? What of relative metabolic diet related illnesses? How would you cope with the one-time diet of an Inuit?

Remember evolution works on very very small selective advantages - a mutation or immigrant gene with a 1% selective advantage will come to dominate a population in a surprisingly short number of generations.

European mixing in the iron age would be bringing together people who's cultural and genetic heritage would have been based on staple diets of either oats or wheat, fish or meat - even a percent or two of greater metabolic efficiency would make a surprising and unintuitively large difference at a population level over many generations, where each generation had at least some years living close to the edge of viability - because you either survive or you don't - you can come close to death from famine or die, and if the dice is skewed in the favour of those "genes" who dwell in bodies extracting a few percent more calories a day from the local staple food - then these will come to dominate. Selection like this is a complex thing to hold in your head because it doesn't work at the level of a group, or even individual, but at the level of the gene. These genes can rapidly move horizontally through different cultural groups with very little cross fertilisation.

It's not always a case of bringing your culture with you - the land and environment is different. It's very hard to grow wheat on the Lleyn even today so you'd have had to grow oats - and you certainly can't bring a culture of olive growing etc. etc.

And we haven't even started on locally endemic parasites and disease...


In actual fact most of the 'sequences of DNA' used in studies like these aren't part of genes - the trouble is they are located near genes and so are 'selected' and carried together (because of the way DNA behaves at meiosis- but I don't want to get to technical!)

[Heron]

Nov 11, 2009 20:12:08 GMT -1 Francis said:

No - but my point is that there would have been more subtle selective effects. I was just demonstrating at the grossest most obvious level that however selectively neutral genetic heritage is for humans today in modern Britain - whether you're from Tasmania, Newfoundland, the Hindu Kush, the Kalahari or the Aleutian Islands your genetic heritage would be essentially selectively neutral living in modern Britain – several thousand years ago it is very likely that your genetic heritage was much more important in terms of selection/survival.

When we lived closer to nature there was more opportunity for selection to act. I suspect that even fairly subtle genetic differences would have had greater impact back then – i.e. intra-european differences may have been important.

When your body is closer to the limit of balance, as would typically have been the case by the end of harsh winters, with poor diet etc. then relatively slight metabolic differences and efficiencies would have mattered. Just think what percentage of a diet the various European staples would have been several thousand years ago. Slight differences in metabolism of these would have made big differences over many generations once upon a time - differences that would be wholly irrelevant today.

Would a group of swarthy Etruscans after generations of selection for fat metabolism geared to fish and olives be on average as well adapted to living in a land where cheese meat and oats is the only option. In the good years probably no problem, but in times of stress? What of relative metabolic diet related illnesses? How would you cope with the one-time diet of an Inuit?

Remember evolution works on very very small selective advantages - a mutation or immigrant gene with a 1% selective advantage will come to dominate a population in a surprisingly short number of generations.

European mixing in the iron age would be bringing together people who's cultural and genetic heritage would have been based on staple diets of either oats or wheat, fish or meat - even a percent or two of greater metabolic efficiency would make a surprising and unintuitively large difference at a population level over many generations, where each generation had at least some years living close to the edge of viability - because you either survive or you don't - you can come close to death from famine or die, and if the dice is skewed in the favour of those "genes" who dwell in bodies extracting a few percent more calories a day from the local staple food - then these will come to dominate. Selection like this is a complex thing to hold in your head because it doesn't work at the level of a group, or even individual, but at the level of the gene. These genes can rapidly move horizontally through different cultural groups with very little cross fertilisation.

It's not always a case of bringing your culture with you - the land and environment is different. It's very hard to grow wheat on the Lleyn even today so you'd have had to grow oats - and you certainly can't bring a culture of olive growing etc. etc.

And we haven't even started on locally endemic parasites and disease...


In actual fact most of the 'sequences of DNA' used in studies like these aren't part of genes - the trouble is they are located near genes and so are 'selected' and carried together (because of the way DNA behaves at meiosis- but I don't want to get to technical!)

OK. If travelling across the North Sea would have been enough to expose Germanic invaders to those subtle effects I suppose it would explain Oppenheimer's point - if I remember it correctly, that those invaders left a remarkably small genetic effect on the population. I'd always put that down to the fact that the cultural elites whose artefacts have survived were not necessarily a very large percentage of the population anyway.

But the main thing that strikes me about such theories is that it seems impossible to reconcile evidence coming from different disciplines like archaeology, linguistics and genetics. A really convincing theory would be one that explained the findings of all three disciplines.

[Deleted]

Nov 11, 2009 21:40:28 GMT -1 Heron said:

Nov 11, 2009 20:12:08 GMT -1 Francis said:

But the main thing that strikes me about such theories is that it seems impossible to reconcile evidence coming from different disciplines like archaeology, linguistics and genetics. A really convincing theory would be one that explained the findings of all three disciplines.

I agree, those are the situations where the possibilities of genetic evidence becomes really interesting. Oppenheimer tried to do this but linguists in particular don't seem to agree he managed it!

[Francis]

Grief I expressed that poorly!

Ultimately If selection was involved in favouring any of the DNA sequences examined in the study, then very little "crossbreeding" with the resident population would see DNA patterns from the resident population very quickly "invade" the immigrant population. (You have to remember how very very similar the two populations are genetically to begin with though - which facilitates the process, as all the DNA sequences will find themselves in a genetic environment similar to the one they were originally favoured in - i.e. there are no genetic compatibility problems and so they can work well together with no incompatibility complications).

So where the immigrant and resident populations are very similar- the genetic identity of the immigrant population can be lost very quickly, with only minimal crossbreeding with the resident population. Once favourable genes from the resident population are present in the invading one they very quickly spread through it. As mentioned early because of the way in which the chromosomes pair up when forming eggs/sperm (Crossing over at Meiosis) genes aren't selected for in isolation - they come with other very large sequences of DNA.

The method of DNA analysis used in studies like these is very good at looking at deep roots in evolutionary trees, and at looking at the slow movements of species across the planet - but is very poor at dealing with an animal like humans that makes (in an evolutionary context) lots of very rapid population movements.

There are some new ideas for looking at this sort of human history that focus on the genetic basis of the immune system - I think we may have more useful information in about 5 years or so.

The only downside to having escaped academia totally, a few months ago, is I no longer have access to the journals so I'll be out of the loop - Lee perhaps?

[Francis]

I'd meant to add that the classic example of this is the now very rapid spread of lactose tolerance amongst the poorest Asian peoples. (most westerners are able to produce the enzyme lactase in adult life, enabling them to digest the sugar lactose in milk - this isn't the case with Asian populations).

Here you have a limited cross-fertilization by westerners bringing the genes for lactose tolerance into these populations - which then rapidly spread - because the level of food stress is high therefore high selection pressure (not in terms of starvation and death but in terms of fecundity i.e. having a nutritionally high enough status to have a greater number of successful pregnancies and rear the babe on the breast etc.). The spread of lactose tolerance amongst more wealthy Asians is low even thought there is more frequent mixing of the gene pool because the selection pressure is lower- i.e. food is freely available and no need for every calorie to count.

Because of the linkage of large sections of DNA to the selected genes (Crossover/meiosis) much more western DNA is brought into the poorer Asian populations than just the lactose tolerant genes.

P.S. I know most New-Agey types think they're lactose intolerant - they're not!!

[Lee]

Nov 12, 2009 8:50:50 GMT -1 Francis said:

The only downside to having escaped academia totally, a few months ago, is I no longer have access to the journals so I'll be out of the loop - Lee perhaps?

im out of the loop too - i tend to stick with journals relevant t what i am working on and at the moment that isnt cellular biologgy or genetics. that said i have access to those kinds of journals - often electronically. let me know if there is anything that you might like a look at and i will see what i can do.

[Deleted]

Nov 12, 2009 11:57:07 GMT -1 Francis said:

P.S. I know most New-Agey types think they're lactose intolerant - they're not!!

hehe. What is it about that! I don't suppose you can genetically discredit New-Agey people with gluten intolerance too can you because that does my head in. I don't know what it's like over there but it seems like fear of milk and bread is the mark of the goddess these days. How special and spiritually elect you are can be directly linked to how many things you can't eat and how much of a pain in the butt you can be to cook for.